Conventional musical education typically begins by teaching a student a musical notation system. Musical notation systems communicate information about the notes that make up a musical piece, and enable a performer to produce the musical piece on a musical instrument. For example, in Western society, most students learn the five-line staff notation, in which pitch is represented by placement of notes (along with accidentals, such as sharps, flats, and naturals) on the staff and duration is represented with different note values (along with additional symbols such as dots and ties). Additionally, a musical notation system may comprise various other musical symbols (such as chord names, written or unwritten), which indicate the notes to produce.
Concurrent with learning a notation system, students learn how that notation system maps to the instrument being learned. After much practice, many students learn to play musical pieces on the instrument when presented with notations representing the musical pieces. For example, students may learn how to map the staff notation to a musical keyboard, such as on a piano. Some students can become adept at memorizing musical pieces, and a small number of students become musically fluent and are able to write music, modify musical pieces, improvise during performance, “play by ear,” and the like.
While conventional musical education does enable many students to learn notation systems and instruments, conventional musical education can be insufficient for a large proportion of students. For example, most students are taught within a limited tonal framework and on a subset of an instrument in the early stages of their education. Furthermore, most students are encouraged to adhere rigidly to written notes, and to exercise their ability to play those written notes. As such, students may become limited in their ability to understand musical concepts aurally, and to play music that interests them during the early stages of their education, which often leads to frustration, disinterest, and cessation of music study. Furthermore, even when students gain some mastery of a simplified system, those students may have difficulty moving on to a more complete system and to full use of a musical instrument.
Conventional musical education also encourages visual orientation to both the notation system and the instrument being played (e.g., to follow written notes and/or to look at the instrument during play). As such, while students may be able to reproduce music from a written notation system, those students may become limited in their ability to navigate the instrument through their tactile senses, which in turn limits their ability to read music fluently at sight, and/or to develop an instinctive technique on the instrument.